 Jane Skelding and her husband Dean. They had an unexpected stay at a Georgia hospital after she contracted necrotizing fasciitis, the flesh-eating disease. (Family photo).
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Jane Skelding is happy to be recuperating at home with her family after her second operation to fight deadly flesh-eating disease.
Although surgeons had to remove half of her right breast and sent her home in pain without closing the incision from her breast to her armpit, she is surprisingly upbeat.
"Looks as though there could be a happy ending, but I'm not finished yet. I just hope I don't have to have any more surgeries," Skelding said yesterday at her Brantford home.
Skelding, 38, her husband, sister and her four children departed on May 10 to Kissimmee, Fla. for a two-week vacation. They were enjoying themselves until the second week when she started to feel sick and had pains in her right breast.
She went to a Florida hospital, but doctors couldn't come up with a diagnosis so the family decided to end the vacation and drive home.
It was then that Skelding started getting worse and the family stopped at a small hospital in Adele, Ga.
"The infection was spreading. Under my right breast had a black area with red in the middle and pus," she said.
This time doctors realized she had flesh-eating disease. "They told me if I had tried to drive the 18 hours home, I would have been dead before I got there," she said.
The poison in her body caused the skin to peel off her hands like a glove, made her tongue split and swell four times its normal size and her body swelled up an extra 30 pounds.
"Every thing was starting to shut down and I was watching my wife dying," husband Dean Skelding, an OPP officer, said.
Surgeons knew they needed to cut the disease out.
After a week in Adele, Skelding's insurance company flew the couple back to Canada, where she needed a second operation at her hometown hospital in Brantford.
"I still had the infection, so I needed a second surgery. They cut from the right breast to my armpit and they dug down to get out the infection. Then they leave it open and you look like a cut-open fish," she said.
She was sent home with the open wound, a standard practice with this disease. A nurse will make house calls to change her gauze daily.
Today, Skelding will be back in the hospital to check if she is still disease-free.
She did not have the contagious form of flesh-eating disease. Necrotizing fasciitis is caused by the bacteria known as group A streptococcus. Symptoms include fever, an unwell feeling and redness and severe pain at the site of an infection like a minor wound, small cut or bruise.
It will be fall at the earliest before she can return to work.
Her husband has received compassionate leave and has banked time off.
Yesterday, the Skeldings received a $158,000 hospital bill, which is covered by their insurance policy.
